Backers of Iraq-U.S. Pact Seek Votes in Parliament

BAGHDAD — Intensive last-minute negotiations were under way on Tuesday to corral votes in the Iraqi Parliament for a security and strategic framework agreement that, if approved, would be a road map for the complete withdrawal of American troops from Iraq in three years.

Much is at stake for the country, which still relies on American forces to fight the remnants of the insurgency, and for Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who spent eight months negotiating the pact with the Americans. Mr. Maliki has waged a strong and skillful lobbying campaign for its passage — a feat charged with political danger when many Iraqis still see the Americans as an occupying power.

Under Iraqi law, Parliament must approve the agreement. For the Iraqis and the Americans as well, broad Iraqi parliamentary approval is critical to ending a war that has been unpopular in the United States and abroad.

During the long negotiations over the pact’s provisions, Iraqis often worried that they would get the short end of the deal, but even they say that the final version gives them more than they expected. Hard bargaining and the damage the war has done to the United States’ reputation, they said, had forced the Americans to give ground on several of the most important points.

The pact being discussed grants much greater oversight powers to the Iraqis for American military maneuvers than do most such agreements the United States has signed. In practice, however, this may not make an enormous difference, as many combat operations in recent months have been jointly planned and executed.

“I don’t share the concern that we are constrained by this agreement,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow in military strategy at the Brookings Institution. “We always have constraints in our agreements with our allies.”

For Americans, the pact is a practical step toward concluding a venture that has proved costly in blood and dollars, and has so far fallen short of its promise to create a stable democracy in the Middle East.

“It is very hard for the Bush administration to spin this as a victory; it’s more an acknowledgment of realities that are forcing American forces to draw down,” said Joost Hiltermann, an Istanbul-based analyst for the International Crisis Group, a research and advisory organization. In the Middle East, where leaders are sensitive to the slightest signs of weakness, it is considered unimaginable that a country that has given so much in a war — in lives and money — would walk away without a tangible prize.

Photo

American soldiers on patrol this week in Mosul, Iraq. The role of American troops would change under an agreement with Iraq.Credit
Petros Giannakouris/Associated Press

“It may be a pragmatic move, it may have salvaged the deal, it may serve Iraq’s needs, but the symbolism of it does not support the idea of reconstitution of America’s position in the region,” said Vali Nasr, a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. “If the U.S. had to compromise publicly with such a weak government, the governments sitting in Kuwait and Tehran, they’re going to take note.”

The United States has at least 80 status of forces agreements around the world, including several in Middle Eastern countries. Such an agreement, known as a SOFA, sets out the legal status of American forces and property on foreign soil, and typically includes articles on criminal and civil jurisdiction over troop behavior, but also on taxes, customs and rules for entry and exit.

But the agreement with Iraq — which American officials in Baghdad call a security agreement and the Iraqis call a withdrawal agreement — differs in several important ways.

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Because Iraq is still a combat zone, the agreement has an array of restrictions on American operations to ensure that the Iraqi government has real control over troop activities, in addition to a timeline for the withdrawal of foreign troops in the country.

“It is, as far as I know, unprecedented in a SOFA,” said Oona Hathaway, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has criticized the method by which the agreement was negotiated. “When we have active military operations, almost always there is a treaty or some agreement that has been approved by Congress that serves as a basis, and the SOFA just carries out the details.”

Despite the many restraints on American operations, Iraqi lawmakers still expressed uneasiness with the pact. Their misgivings were not with its content so much as fears that it might cede too much power to Mr. Maliki’s government.

Day and night for at least the past five days, the different political blocs in Parliament have formed shifting alliances and sought to use their votes as leverage to get riders attached to the measure. In a sign of the agreement’s importance to the Americans, the halls of the Iraqi Parliament were filled Tuesday with embassy staff members buttonholing Iraqi lawmakers and counting votes.

If the pact failed to win approval, there would be no legal basis for the United States military to continue operations in Iraq after Dec. 31, when the United Nations resolution governing the American military presence expires. While it is theoretically possible to extend that resolution, there is little appetite for doing so, since Iraq’s government is adamant that the country no longer be governed under the United Nations resolution now in place.

The round of meetings still under way late Tuesday involved efforts to nail down the votes of Sunni and Kurdish lawmakers by devising a resolution that would reassure them that the Maliki government would listen to their demands.

For many Iraqis the pact is “a necessary evil,” said Laith Kubba, who served as a spokesman for the Iraqi government in 2005 and now is the senior director for the Middle East at the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, a nonprofit, non-partisan organization that supports efforts to build democratic states abroad.

“The real dilemma facing Arab Iraq is that the country is weak and it absolutely needs an ally to hold its hand,” Mr. Kubba said. “In a way it’s a love-hate relationship, because that ally that they need created a lot of mess because of mismanagement.”

Suadad al-Salhy, Atheer Kakan and Tariq Maher contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: Backers of Iraq-U.S. Pact Seek Votes in Parliament. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe